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January 27, 2010

Blogging 101Facebook Metrics Businesses Have Been Longing For

By Eden Litt
Web Project Manager

Last week, Facebook released a new feature for fan page administrators that will greatly benefit our clients. Authenticated pages with at least 10,000 fans will now feature two new metrics under status updates: Raw Impressions and Feedback Rate.

But what do they mean?

  • Raw Impressions indicate the number of times a post has “rendered.” In other words, every time the post is displayed on the page’s wall, in a fan’s live or news feed, or in a Facebook widget, it counts as an impression.
  • Feedback Rate calculates the number of comments and likes received on a post per impression. The formula equates to (Comments + Likes)/Impressions.

In addition to gathering more numbers on fans, these metrics will allow admins to better gauge their fans’ interactions with posts. This will allow us to better target content and timing of posts. While there are many more metrics we’re still dying to know, Facebook is taking baby steps in becoming more hospitable to the business world.

Posted by staff at 02:03 PM
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January 21, 2010

Blogging 101Changes to HelpAReporter.com Reflect E-mail Harvesting

If you're like me and my team of social media relations specialist, you subscribe to Peter Shankman's newsletter, Help A Reporter Out. Three times a business day, without fail, you get list of several queries from writers, freelancers, journalists and bloggers working on stories to which you and your clients may be able to contribute. But if you've perused your Shankmans lately you'll have noticed a change. No longer does the query, which gives subject, need and deadline, list the writer's e-mail address. Rather, it's a coded e-mail that goes into a new hub and relays the message to the writer. So for example, queries that used to appear with the e-mail "foodblogger@suchandsuch.com" will now appear as "queryxxy@helpareporter.com."

Why the change? You guessed it: too many writers were getting irrelevant e-mails from PR and marketing people like us. I had a chance to ask Shankman about it, and he said in an e-mail, "Too many people harvesting e-mails, too many people adding to lists, too many people spamming and not playing nice. We didn't have a choice." Shankman has always been explicit about how to use Help a Reporter Out, so this is no surprise. But it is a shame it had to come to this; I have made numerous valuable friendlies from the newsletter and will continue to endeavor to do so within the new rules. As Shankman might say, play nice!

What does this mean for PR people like me? You have to be quicker in responding to these queries, you can't let them pile up and then go through them all at once. The coded e-mails used in the newsletter are only live until the deadline set by the writer. In other words, if a writer tells you he is working on a story and his deadline is 5:00 P.M. EST, at 5:01 the e-mail queryxxy@helpareporter.com will go dead.

Posted by staff at 10:50 AM
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January 08, 2010

Blogging 101It's OK to Be Anti-Social


blogworks_antisocial.jpg

By Nichole Mrasek
Account Supervisor

Feeling socially overwhelmed online? From Facebook to LinkedIn, there is a social network ready to connect you to friends, old schoolmates, boyfriends/girlfriends and family. A new social networking site, By/Association, unclutters the news feed noise and caters to people with specific networking needs.

The site touts itself as exclusive and inherently important. From the company’s Web site: “By/Association is a community of remarkable individuals, hand-selected to seed inspiring and unexpected introductions.”

The site offers exclusivity by requiring that members join through an application process. And don’t worry about finding a good profile picture. The New York Times reports that the network doesn’t allow searching for people or pictures. This is because the site has one main purpose: networking. Its mission is to offer a place where people can connect and share ideas, philosophies and enrich projects they are working on, and, ultimately, their lives,

“The site covers London, Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York, with plans to expand to Toronto and Chicago by the end of the year,” according to the Times.

The site is definitely off to a clean start. But will it eventually evolve, as other online platforms have, and open its policies to meet the demands that its network will eventually create?

Read the full feature for more details and an interview with the site’s founder, The Anti-Social-Network Social Network.

Posted by staff at 01:16 PM
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